Wednesday, 7 January 2026

The story of one family in Chorlton ........... Jim and Annie McLoughlin

This is young Annie Magee aged fifteen in 1923 outside her home on what is now Ivy Green Road.
Miss Annie Magee in 1923
It comes from a wonderful collection of photographs belonging to Peter McLoughlin whose parents lived and worked in Chorlton during the first half of the last century.

Miss Magee was Peter’s mother.  She was born in 1910, and married his father in 1946.

Mr McLoughlin had lived at Brook Farm Dairy from 1920 and included in the collection are “pictures my Father with the horses outside the dairy which became Dobsons and latterly Express before its demolition.

Dad lived away for three years during the war and when he came back to the dairy got married to Mum in 1946. He then took over the Stockport Dairy and I was born in Stockport in 1950.”

So there you have it the start of a new series featuring a collection of pictures which Peter has agreed to share and what’s more has the stories behind each one.

Now that doesn’t always happen.  Most of the ones I come across are just pictures without that personal aspect.

They tend to be either commercial photographs which were posed and were sold on to picture postcard companies or are long forgotten snaps found at the back of a cupboard  without a date or even a name to identify the place or the individual.

But Peter’s are different and point to just how important it is to preserve both the images and the stories which come with them.

Jim McLoughlin in 1927
All of which is the start of a new series which with Peter’s permission will feature more of the collection and dig deep into the history of Chorlton and his family.

After all the diary has long gone replaced by a set of smart town houses, and as memories fade it will not be that long before even the existence of Brook Dairy/Dobson’s/Express Diaries are lost forever.

Equally there will few left who now know that long before it was a dairy it was a farm stretching back into the early part of the 19th century and most likely established during the century before.

But those are stories for another time.

Pictures; Annie Magee in1923, Jim McLoughlin in 1927 at 106 Chorltonville, courtesy of Peter McLoughlin


Visions of a future ……. Hulme ……. 1965



Location; Hulme












Picture; Visions of a future, Courtesy of Manchester Archives+ Town Hall Photographers' Collection  

https://www.flickr.com/photos/manchesterarchiveplus/albums/72157684413651581?fbclid=IwAR35NR9v6lzJfkiSsHgHdQyL2CCuQUHuCuVr8xnd403q534MNgY5g1nAZfY

Looking for the Blackheath Hospital ........... and finding it

Now I thought I had found Blackheath Hospital, but alas it is not so.

Nurses, Starting, Green, Leadbetter & Lines, May 1931
For while there is a very impressive private hospital with that name at 40-42 Lee Terrace it is not the one, I am looking for.

It was only opened in 1984, having had a varied history including as a private residency, a school, and old people’s home and even during the Second World War as a fire station.*

And so it cannot be the one where a young Jean Lines trained in 1931.

I must admit I doubted that it would be that easy to find, more so because many of the ways of locating the place are denied to me.

So while I have maps and street directories of Blackheath they do not stretch to the 1930s.

All I have so far is an entry in the 1932 electoral register for Jean Lines who was living at 32 St John’s Park, along with five other women.

This is all the more frustrating given that I have quite a few pictures of Ms. Lines and other members of the family, which come from the family collection of Frances Jones.**

Jean Lines left of centre
Like many such collections they are a mix of professional photographs and snaps.

And of these snaps there are three of Jean Lines and a caption which links her to a hospital in Blackheath where she was training to be a nurse.

Of course, if I were dealing with Greater Manchester I would be confident that I could track it and her down, but alas Blackheath is a long way from where I live.

And my hospital may not even have been called Blackheath Hospital, but it is or was out there in 1931.

That said there will be someone who knows, and can point me in the right direction, which will add to what I know of this young woman.

Jean Lines  (training at Blackheath)

We shall see.

And within minutes of posting the story and the quest to find Jean's hospital, Frances came up with a link to the place I having looking for.  

It comes from that very interesting site, Lost Hospitals of London, which I have used in  the past but had forgotten about, leaving me just to to thank Frances and post the link.

I could of course just lift the information , but that's not how I work.

Location; Blackheath

Pictures; from the family collection of Frances Jones

*Paradise  Tree Care, https://treesurgeonsblackheath.co.uk/blackheath-se3-places-of-interest-hospital-pubs-bars-and-the-royal-standard/

**Stories behind the pictures ………https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/2022/06/stories-behind-pictures.html

***Blackheath & Charlton Hospital, Shooters Hill, Blackheath, SE3, Lost Hospitals of London, https://ezitis.myzen.co.uk/blackheathandcharlton.html?fbclid=IwAR02-vedWbKnRmGT0daOLWtxunBcvFXsGHmlvZVtut_XLHJ1PPFnxMu9RtM

Tuesday, 6 January 2026

The Penny -a-Week Fund …… the Ashton-Under-Lyne Committee .... and a neglected history book

Now the Tiger Kills, was one of the books I bought from Bryan the Book on Beech Road sometime in the 1980s.


It was already almost 40 years old and was one of a series published by HMSO telling the story of the Second World War.

Soldiers of the Indian Divisions, 1944
A modern historian may be careful about their lack of objectivity and the accuracy of some of the detail given wartime censorship, but they remain a fascinating contemporary insight into those six years.

I have a few, but despite their length in my custody, I have to admit to never reading them, and only writing about one.*

But today I brought down The Tiger Kills, which came out in 1944, and was “The story of the Indian Divisions in the North African Campaign”.

‘The first formations to go overseas from India were the now renowned 45y and 5th Indian Divisions.  The story of their deeds up to the destruction of Italy’s East African Empire and the expulsion of the Vicy French from Syria was told in the Tiger Strikes which was published in India in 1942.  [while] the Tiger Kills tells the of the fighting against the Germans by Indian and British soldiers who together composed the formidable fighting formations which went from India to the Middle East.  

The story is one of further successes, of desperate defence and then final victory in North Africa,  [with] their dash and courage in attack, and their steadfastness and tenacity in defence.’”**

So I rather wish I had read it earlier, not least because of its emphasis on the contribution made bu soldiers of whay was then the Empire and now the Commonwealth.

The Penny-a-Week- Fund, circa 1944
Nor is that all, because just inside the book were three sheets of headed note paper for the Penny-a-Week- Fund, H.R.H., The Duke of Gloucester’s Red Cross and St. John Appeal.

According to one source, "it was launched in September 1939 to raise funds for those affected by the Second World War. By 1946 the appeal had raised £54,324,408, which is the equivalent of £7,700,000,000 today, making it the largest charitable fund ever raised in the UK. The proceeds of the fund went to the Red Cross and St John War Organisation.

The fund committee decided to run appeals targeted to particular sections of the community.

The penny-a-week fund was a scheme created with the co-operation of the TUC and Employers’ Organisation to collect a penny week from workers, which was deducted from their wages. The fund raised £17,663,225 (£2.5 billion today) – all in pennies. Its success was credited to the idea of collecting a small amount of money from a large number of people. 

Detail of the Penny-a-Week-Fund, circa 1944
The amount did not make a significant difference to the donor’s weekly budget but the pennies added up to raise more than one third of the entire Duke of Gloucester’s Appeal. 

This was the precursor to payroll giving as we know it today. In 2011/12 £118 million is donated through payroll giving in the UK currently 2, a mere 34 per cent of what the penny-a-week fund collected annually during the war years.”***

I must confess  to having come across it before, and having read about the Spitfire Fund, but like the Great War charities raised vast amounts of money during the six years of the war.

But I am drawn to the Ashton-Under-Lyne Committee, partly because I lived in Ashton in the early 1970s, and so went looking for 51, Hutton Avenue which was home to Jim Timperley, who was the Honourable Secretary of the branch.

Into Battle- British and Indian Together, 1942
He was living in Hutton Avenue by 1939, described himself as a “shop manager, tailoring” had been born in 1910 and was active in the Auxiliary Fire Service.  He was married but as yet the name of his wife has yet to be discovered.****

And the house is still there just up from Beaufort Road a short walk from Stamford Park close to the Sycamore pub, a place we regularly visited.

So that is about it, but presents more research opportunities connected with the Ashton Committee, and The Penny-a-Week Fund, along with anafternoon reading about the contribution of the Indian Divisions.

*The book and the personal story …..... Greece in 1941, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-book-and-personal-story-greece-in.html

**General Sir Claude Auchinleck, G.C.I.E, C.B., D.S.O., A.D.C., Commander-in-Chief in India

*** British Red Cross: the £7.7 billion appeal that changed British fundraising forever, SOFII,  https://sofii.org/case-study/british-red-cross-the-7.7-billion-appeal-that-changed-british-fundraising-forever

****1939 Register

As others see us ......... Well Hall in the summer of 1966 by Ian Nairn

The thing about guide books is that they date so quickly.  

But that can be what makes them so intriguing and that pretty much sums up Nairn’s London.*

It was published in 1966 and I picked up my copy over 20 years later from Bryan the Book.

And that is a tale in itself given that Bryan’s bookshop on Beech Road in Chorlton-cum-Hardy is 214 miles from Well Hall where I grew up.

Nor is that all for the original cover price was eight shillings and sixpence and I bought it for 40p.

The publisher warned that “some of the entries are already disappearing; so go and see the rest quickly.”

That said it is reassuring that the places in Well Hall and Eltham visited by Mr Nairn are still there, although not all are described in that fulsome and respective manner of most guide books

So in writing about Eltham Lodge he comments, “nothing great, but worth at least a sentimental journey to see this grandfather of all Georgian brick Boxes.”

But I am pleased my own estate fared not only better but also was described with a little affection.

“Well Hall Estate, Eltham Sir Frank Baines and others, 1916

This extraordinary place was designed in seven days as a rush job to house war-workers for Woolwich Arsenal.  It seems an odd recipe for one of the best housing estates near London.  

Perhaps the architects imply did not have time to air their preconceptions, and the local officials their disastrous application of bye-laws.  


Comfortable, cottagey design, slate and stucco, taken out of the rarified atmosphere of the garden cities, always trying to see streets as entities rather than collections of units.  

The best part is Ross Way, running from Well Hall Road at the junction of Rochester Way.  

This curves round a gentle slope with a raised footpath and uses every possible trick of gables and end walls.  

Half way along, footpaths run off under archways as part of a fairy-tale composition which by an irony is more like a German village than anything else.”***

It is a long time since I have looked through the book but with a wet weekend ahead I think I shall spend a few hours crossing London courtesy of Mr Nairn.

And as the publisher promised the book is the first of a series with one planned for the Industrial North, which sadly was never written which is a shame because  having said some nice things  about where I grew up I wondered if he would do the same for where I now live.

Well we shall see.

Picture; cover from Nairn’s London, 1966

*Nairn’s London, Ian Nairn, 1966

**ibid page 207


***ibid page 208

A prize for Park Brow Farm in Chorlton

Here is a little bit of our history which often gets over looked.

In 1916 Park Brow Farm was awarded a certificate of Merit at the Manchester Show “in the Competition for supplying Milk daily from Lancashire and Cheshire to Manchester and Salford or anywhere within a mile radius of Manchester Town Hall.”

In an age when a milk float is a rarity it is easy to forget that until very recently milk on the door step before eight in the morning along with a daily paper just how it was.

Of course on very hot days that milk had to be collected quickly and I do remember on occasion how the seal had been pecked by a bird.

And if like me you were born in the first half of the last century the chances are that your milk will have been delivered by horse and cart.

I know full well Mr Bailey who ran Park Brow delivered his by horse and cart as did Mrs Lomax who lived opposite and ran her milk round from Hough End Hall.

And back then the milk arrived in churns and was decanted into a jug. Sadly the stories of being sent to collect the milk direct from the farm are fading from living memory, but my old friend Marjory was full of the tales of being sent. and there were still plenty to choose from when she was young but given that she lived on Provis Road it was just a short trip across to the frm yard opposite

And that is all I am going to say having already in the past explored the demands for municipal milk and the milk boy of Edge Lane.

Location; Park Brow Farm, Chorlton-cum-Hardy

Pictures, 1916 certificate, from the collection of Oliver Bailey

That corner shop in 1969 ……………


Now, leaving aside any poor jokes about that virus and the soft drinks company, there is much in this picture that tells a story of how we lived.

It starts of course with the corner shop, although this one I freely admit is not on a corner.

But these general shops which sold everything from Cornflakes to plasters, heaps of tinned food and toilet roll were once where most of us shopped.

Look closely at the windows and there are plenty of the products we still buy today.

I  can’t be exactly sure where we are, but the poster in the window advertises a Gala at Barmouth Street Baths and Washhouse, which anchors us in the Bradford Beswick area, just a short walk from Grey Mare Lane.

And during the year we lived on Butterworth Street, facing Grey Mare Lane Market, I took myself off one day and took some very poor pictures of the area including the baths, which gives the picture and the story a bit of a personal touch.

More so because I also remember those doors like the one beside the shop which gave access to a common yard.

Nana and Grandad, living in Hope Street in Derby had just such an access door to what had been a common yard with a set of outside lavatories , shared by several houses.

So that is it.  I doubt that by 1972, when we lived on Butterworth Street this row of terraced properties still existed.

But looking at a map today of the area I worked out a rough route from our flat to where the baths had been, which makes for a little bit more personal history.


Location; Bradford, Beswick 

Picture; the shop1969, Courtesy of Manchester Archives+ Town Hall Photographers' Collection,